The Truth About Lying
- From: rpautrey2 <rpautrey2@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 07:42:50 -0700 (PDT)
The Truth About Lying
Deception is rampant—and sometimes we tell the biggest lies to those
we love most.
By: Allison Kornet
If, as the cliché has it, the 1980s was the decade of greed, then the
quintessential sin of the 1990s might just have been lying. After all,
think of the accusations of deceit leveled at politicians like Bob
Packwood, Marion Barry, Dan Rostenkowski, Newt Gingrich, and Bill
Clinton.
And consider the top-level Texaco executives who initially denied
making racist comments at board meetings; the young monk who falsely
accused Cardinal Bernardin of molestation; Susan Smith, the white
woman who killed her young boys and blamed a black man for it; and Joe
Klein, the Newsweek columnist who adamantly swore for months that he
had nothing to do with his anonymously-published novel Primary Colors.
Even Hollywood noticed our apparent deception obsession: witness films
like Quiz Show, True Lies, The Crucible, Secrets & Lies, and Liar,
Liar.
Leonard Saxe, Ph.D., a polygraph expert and professor of psychology at
Brandeis University, says, "Lying has long been a part of everyday
life. We couldn't get through the day without being deceptive." Yet
until recently lying was almost entirely ignored by psychologists,
leaving serious discussion of the topic in the hands of ethicists and
theologians. Freud wrote next to nothing about deception; even the
1500-page Encyclopedia of Psychology, published in 1984, mentions lies
only in a brief entry on detecting them. But as psychologists delve
deeper into the details of deception, they're finding that lying is a
surprisingly common and complex phenomenon.
For starters, the work by Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a psychologist at the
University of Virginia, confirms Nietzche's assertion that the lie is
a condition of life. In a 1996 study, DePaulo and her colleagues had
147 people between the ages of 18 and 71 keep a diary of all the
falsehoods they told over the course of a week. Most people, she
found, lie once or twice a day—almost as often as they snack from the
refrigerator or brush their teeth. Both men and women lie in
approximately a fifth of their social exchanges lasting 10 or more
minutes; over the course of a week they deceive about 30 percent of
those with whom they interact one-on-one. Furthermore, some types of
relationships, such as those between parents and teens, are virtual
magnets for deception: "College students lie to their mothers in one
out of two conversations," reports DePaulo. (Incidentally, when
researchers refer to lying, they don't include the mindless
pleasantries or polite equivocations we offer each other in passing,
such as "I'm fine, thanks" or "No trouble at all." An "official" lie
actually misleads, deliberately conveying a false impression. So
complimenting a friend's awful haircut or telling a creditor that the
check is in the mail both qualify.)
Saxe points out that most of us receive conflicting messages about
lying. Although we're socialized from the time we can speak to believe
that it's always better to tell the truth, in reality society often
encourages and even rewards deception. Show up late for an early
morning meeting at work and it's best not to admit that you overslept.
"You're punished far more than you would be if you lie and say you
were stuck in traffic," Saxe notes. Moreover, lying is integral to
many occupations. Think how often we see lawyers constructing far-
fetched theories on behalf of their clients or reporters
misrepresenting themselves in order to gain access to good stories.
Of Course I Love You
Dishonesty also pervades our romantic relationships, as you might
expect from the titles of books like 101 Lies Men Tell Women (Harper
Collins), by Missouri psychologist Dory Hollander, Ph.D. (Hollander's
nomination for the #1 spot: "I'll call you.") Eighty-five percent of
the couples interviewed in a 1990 study of college students reported
that one or both partners had lied about past relationships or recent
indiscretions. And DePaulo finds that dating couples lie to each other
in about a third of their interactions—perhaps even more often than
they deceive other people.
Fortunately, marriage seems to offer some protection against
deception: Spouses lie to each other in "only" about 10 percent of
their major conversations. The bad news? That 10 percent just refers
to the typically minor lies of everyday life. DePaulo recently began
looking at the less frequent "big" lies that involve deep betrayals of
trust, and she's finding that the vast majority of them occur between
people in intimate relationships. "You save your really big lies," she
says, "for the person that you're closest to."
Sweet Little Lies
Though some lies produce interpersonal friction, others may actually
serve as a kind of harmless social lubricant. "They make it easier for
people to get along," says DePaulo, noting that in the diary study one
in every four of the participants' lies were told solely for the
benefit of another person. In fact, "fake positive" lies—those in
which people pretend to like someone or something more than they
actually do ("Your muffins are the best ever")—are about 10 to 20
times more common than "false negative" lies in which people pretend
to like someone or something less ("That two-faced rat will never get
my vote").
Certain cultures may place special importance on these "kind" lies. A
survey of residents at 31 senior citizen centers in Los Angeles
recently revealed that only about half of elderly Korean Americans
believe that patients diagnosed with life-threatening metastatic
cancer should be told the truth about their condition. In contrast,
nearly 90 percent of Americans of European or African descent felt
that the terminally ill should be confronted with the truth.
Not surprisingly, research also confirms that the closer we are to
someone, the more likely it is that the lies we tell them will be
altruistic ones. This is particularly true of women: Although the
sexes lie with equal frequency, women are especially likely to stretch
the truth in order to protect someone else's feelings, DePaulo
reports. Men, on the other hand, are more prone to lying about
themselves—the typical conversation between two guys contains about
eight times as many self-oriented lies as it does falsehoods about
other people.
Men and women may also differ in their ability to deceive their
friends. In a University of Virginia study, psychologists asked pairs
of same-sex friends to try to detect lies told by the other person.
Six months later the researchers repeated the experiment with the same
participants. While women had become slightly better at detecting
their friend's lies over time, men didn't show any improvement—
evidence, perhaps, that women are particularly good at learning to
read their friends more accurately as a relationship deepens.
Who Lies?
Saxe believes that anyone under enough pressure, or given enough
incentive, will lie. But in a study published in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, DePaulo and Deborah A. Kashy,
Ph.D., of Texas A&M University, report that frequent liars tend to be
manipulative and Machiavellian, not to mention overly concerned with
the impression they make on others. Still, DePaulo warns that liars
"don't always fit the stereotype of caring only about themselves.
Further research reveals that extroverted, sociable people are
slightly more likely to lie, and that some personality and physical
traits—notably self-confidence and physical attractiveness—have been
linked to an individual's skill at lying when under pressure.
On the other hand, the people least likely to lie are those who score
high on psychological scales of responsibility and those with
meaningful same-sex friendships. In his book Lies! Lies!! Lies!!! The
Psychology of Deceit (American Psychiatric Press, Inc.), psychiatrist
Charles Ford, M.D., adds depressed people to that list. He suggests
that individuals in the throes of depression seldom deceive others—or
are deceived themselves—because they seem to perceive and describe
reality with greater accuracy than others. Several studies show that
depressed people delude themselves far less than their nondepressed
peers about the amount of control they have over situations, and also
about the effect they have on other people. Researchers such as UCLA
psychologist Shelley Taylor, Ph.D., have even cited such findings as
evidence that a certain amount of self-delusion—basically, lying to
yourself—is essential to good mental health. (Many playwrights,
including Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill, seem to share the same
view about truth-telling. In Death of a Salesman and The Iceman
Cometh, for example, lies are life sustaining: The heroes become
tragic figures when their lies are stripped away.)
Detecting Lies
Anyone who has played cards with a poker-faced opponent can appreciate
how difficult it is to detect a liar. Surprisingly, technology doesn't
help very much. Few experts display much confidence in the deception-
detecting abilities of the polygraph, or lie detector. Geoffrey C.
Bunn, Ph.D., a psychologist and polygraph historian at Canada's York
University, goes so far as to describe the lie detector as "an
entertainment device" rather than a scientific instrument. Created
around 1921 during one of the first collaborations between scientists
and police, the device was quickly popularized by enthusiastic
newspaper headlines and by the element of drama it bestowed in movies
and novels.
But mass appeal doesn't confer legitimacy. The problem with the
polygraph, say experts like Bunn, is that it detects fear, not lying;
the physiological responses that it measures—most often heart rate,
skin conductivity, and rate of respiration—don't necessarily accompany
dishonesty.
"The premise of a lie detector is that a smoke alarm goes off in the
brain when we lie because we're doing something wrong," explains Saxe.
"But sometimes we're completely comfortable with our lies." Thus a
criminal's lie can easily go undetected if he has no fear of telling
it. Similarly, a true statement by an innocent individual could be
misinterpreted if the person is sufficiently afraid of the examination
circumstances. According to Saxe, the best-controlled research
suggests that lie detectors err at a rate anywhere from 25 to 75
percent. Perhaps this is why most state and federal courts won't allow
polygraph "evidence."
Some studies suggest that lies can be detected by means other than a
polygraph—by tracking speech hesitations or changes in vocal pitch,
for example, or by identifying various nervous adaptive habits like
scratching, blinking, or fidgeting. But most psychologists agree that
lie detection is destined to be imperfect. Still, researchers continue
to investigate new ways of picking up lies. While studying how
language patterns are associated with improvements in physical health,
James W. Pennebaker, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Southern
Methodist University, also began to explore whether a person's choice
of words was a sign of deception. Examining data gathered from a text
analysis program, Pennebaker and SMU colleague Diane Berry, Ph.D.,
determined that there are certain language patterns that predict when
someone is being less than honest. For example, liars tend to use
fewer first person words like I or my in both speech and writing. They
are also less apt to use emotional words, such as hurt or angry,
cognitive words, like understand or realize, and so-called exclusive
words, such as but or without, that distinguish between what is and
isn't in a category.
Not Guilty
While the picture of lying that has emerged in recent years is far
more favorable than that suggested by its biblical "thou shalt not"
status, most liars remain at least somewhat conflicted about their
behavior. In DePaulo's studies, participants described conversations
in which they lied as less intimate and pleasant than truthful
encounters, suggesting that people are not entirely at ease with their
deceptions. That may explain why falsehoods are more likely to be told
over the telephone, which provides more anonymity than a face-to-face
conversation. In most cases, however, any mental distress that results
from telling an everyday lie quickly dissipates. Those who took part
in the diary study said they would tell about 75 percent of their lies
again if given a second chance—a position no doubt bolstered by their
generally high success rate. Only about a fifth of their falsehoods
were discovered during the one-week study period.
Certainly anyone who insists on condemning all lies should ponder what
would happen if we could reliably tell when our family, friends,
colleagues, and government leaders were deceiving us. It's tempting to
think that the world would become a better place when purged of the
deceptions that seem to interfere with our attempts at genuine
communication or intimacy. On the other hand, perhaps our social lives
would collapse under the weight of relentless honesty, with unveiled
truths destroying our ability to connect with others. The ubiquity of
lying is clearly a problem, but would we want to will away all of our
lies? Let's be honest.
Psychology Today Magazine, May/Jun 1997
Last Reviewed 6 Sep 2006
Article ID: 936
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http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19970501-000033.html
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